Intel celebrates Moore’s Law… with Gordon Moore

It isn’t every day that Silicon Valley celebrates its rich history with someone who created it. Yet at age 86, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore is very much around to remind people of the scientific and commercial breakthrough he made 50 years ago when he explained to the technical community how semiconductors would develop.

Intel INTC, together with the foundation Moore and his wife Betty started, threw a bash Monday night at San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum to honor the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law. Pundit Thomas Friedman interviewed Moore, still a spry and powerful speaker years into his retirement.

Moore’s Law began as a technical article in an electronics-industry trade publication. Moore, while still at Fairchild Semiconductor, posited that the number of transistors on a semiconductor would continue to double every year, a figure he revised to every two years. Moore noted that his prediction, which he had no idea would be “relatively precise,” was an economic observation as much as a scientific one. It took considerable engineering effort, by Intel and others, to make his “law” come true.

Moore also said he tried to get out of the prediction business as quickly as he got into it. “Once you’ve made a successful prediction you avoid making another one,” he said.

Moore’s Law became a guiding light for an industry. His original article also envisioned a future for cheaper, more powerful semiconductors. He envisioned PCs, cell phones, self-driving cars, and electronic wristwatches—all powered by ever-improving chips.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in conversation with columnist Thomas Friedman in San Francisco on May 11, 2015.

Brian Krzanich, the current CEO of Intel, opened the evening by putting the achievement of Moore’s Law into perspective. Intel’s chips have improved performance a factor of 3,500 since they were introduced, he said, reflecting a 90,000-times improvement in energy efficiency and at one-60,000th of the cost. Were a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle to undergo the same transformation, he said, it would travel at 300,000 miles per hour, achieve 2 million miles per gallon, and cost four cents.

The evening offered hundreds of Moore’s admirers the opportunity to honor his achievements. He recounted that he became interested in science because a neighbor received a gift of a chemistry set that included explosives.

Moore himself didn’t coin the expression Moore’s Law, and he avoided it for decades. “For the first 20 years I couldn’t utter the words Moore’s Law,” he said. “It was embarrassing.” Over time he relented and embraced his accomplishment. Asked by Friedman if he knew which Google search would elicit more responses, Moore’s Law or Murphy’s Law, Moore responded that Moore’s Law would win hands down.

What will tech come up with next?

As the legend goes, in 1964 Dr. Gordon Moore, then at Fairchild Semiconductor, was preparing a paper for Electronics magazine on the evolution of semiconductor memory chips. He decided to plot the capacity of those chips, versus their year of introduction, on some graph paper. There were only a half-dozen or so data points, as memory chips at that point were less than five years old and only contained a few hundred transistors each.

Connecting the dots, Moore noticed a familiar parabolic curve – shallow at the beginning and then quickly turning upwards. Unfortunately, that curve also quickly went straight off the top of the page. So Moore switched to logarithmic paper – that is, with one side in powers of ten — and, stunningly, the memory chips tracked along a straight, nearly horizontal line. Moore, one of the most brilliant individuals in Silicon Valley history (and future Intel INTC co-founder), not only knew what this said, but more important, what it meant.

What it said was that semiconductor memory was progressing at a pace never before seen in any product in human history – and if that pace could be maintained the generational leaps would soon be gigantic. This trajectory – at first defined as the doubling of the performance of semiconductor chips every couple years – became known as Moore’s Law.

But what Moore’s Law meant was that for the first time, perhaps in any industry anywhere, there was now a map into the future. You could track that line decades out into the future – and know exactly what memory chips would be like on any date. And that meant you could plan for that date, and you could build for it. It was a magic key to competitive success.

Moore’s Law quickly spread from memory to logic chips and then to the rest of the semiconductor industry – and quickly made the chip business the fastest growing industry. And soon, the most valuable.

What no one, not even Moore himself, saw coming was that, by the 1980s and 1990s, with tens of billions of chips out in the world, Moore’s Law would break out of electronics and into the rest of the economy. From automotive to infrastructure to genetic research to telephony – companies, laboratories and government agencies discovered that if they could find any way to hook up to Moore’s Law they too could experience exponential growth. One result was the great transformational technology of our time, the Internet.

In writing my new book on the history of Intel Corporation, The Intel Trinity, I became convinced that we have made a serious mistake being so comfortable with that shallow line. And that mistake begins with Gordon Moore’s change of graph paper. That’s because behind the gently sloping straight line there still lies that dizzying parabolic curve. It is this reality that has been largely forgotten over the last few decades.

What lies in that steep arc? Like all parabolic curve, it begins deceptively flat: for the first 40 years, Moore’s Law is a gentle grade. Yet under that comparatively flat curve can be found the minicomputer, the microprocessor, the digital calculator, computer gaming, the personal computer, the Internet, robotics, wireless telephony, the smart phone and electronic commerce – in other words, our world has been utterly transformed by just the shallowest section of this curve.

But then, about 2005, roughly the time the newest chips reached 1 billion transistors on their little squares of silicon, everything changed. Suddenly the great accumulating leaps caused by the biannual doubling of Moore’s Law began to turn the curve nearly straight up, heading toward infinity – and tens of billions of transistors on each chip. In other words, Moore’s Law is now jumping the tech world forward each year more than the sum of all that has been accomplished since the birth of Silicon Valley.

We already have glimmerings. Look at the rise of ‘exponential’ corporations like Facebook FB – the first service product in human history to reach 1 billion regular users – and Twitter TWTR. Look as well at the usage curves of the smartphone, the smart tablet, and the Cloud, the last of which essentially makes memory infinite, ubiquitous and free. All of these earthshaking new products and technologies have exploded on the scene in the last 8 years.

What’s waiting in the wings? The full promise of Big Data – and the end of the 500-year age of sampling and statistics. Soon we’ll be tracking every one of our heartbeats, every fish in the sea and every gust of wind – and we will learn more about the natural world in a few decades than we have in human history. As a billion devices around the world begin to talk with each other, we will also soon be just a minor part of the “The Internet of Things,” which may be a thousand times greater than the human-oriented Internet we currently know.

Further up the curve lies the nanotech revolution. Mobile health and medicine, too. Go up even further and every function of body will be measured every second of our lifetime, and nano-hunter-sensors will swim in our blood helping to hunt down cancer and other diseases.

Up the curve the line between animation and reality also begins to disappear, and modeling – from new products to new worlds to new lives – become a major part of our daily existence. And it will all start with virtual sex, because in tech it always starts with sex.

And then? If you believe Ray Kurzweil, the line goes vertical, we map our brains into computers and live forever. If you believe Malcolm Gladwell, then the curve will eventually taper off.

But neither scenario may arrive for decades. That means that as long as Intel and other chip companies can sustain Moore’s Law we may live within the Great Inflection for the rest of our lives. And, given the announcement recently by Intel and IBM IBM
of a revolutionary new type of transistor technology for chips, the odds of that occurring look better than ever.

Even here in Silicon Valley we are unprepared for this new pace of change. But ready or not, the future is coming … faster than ever.

How Intel Took Moore’s Law from Idea To Ideology

In 1965, you wrote the article that contained the observation we now call Moore’s Law. When you started Intel intc with Robert Noyce and Andy three years later, was it your explicit goal for the company to try to live up to Moore’s Law?

MOORE: You know, this whole notion of Moore’s Law being the driving force of the company wasn’t the case in the beginning. In fact, it wasn’t until ten or 15 years ago that I could even say “Moore’s Law.” We started out just trying to extend the technologies in the ways we felt were appropriate for memory circuits.

GROVE: We didn’t build it into the company mission, we just took it for granted.

MOORE: We just tried to move the technology at as fast a rate as made sense, and it turns out that it pretty much stays on the same curve. The time that we really started pushing and driving it would be over the last few generations of technology. The fact that, although this challenge got harder and more expensive, we’ve been able to accelerate it by a third just amazes me. And by the time we get the 90-nanometers fab up and running, we think we can get to the next generation even a little ahead of that rate. I grew up with this technology, and it’s hard for me to believe that we can either design or build the things we do today.

Why is Intel’s “copy exactly” strategy to ramp up production of new plants quickly such an important element of living up to Moore’s Law?

MOORE: It’s extremely important because it takes a couple of years out of the life span of a generation of products. Historically, with a slower ramp-up it took a lot longer to move a new technology into full-volume production. So in addition to shortening the time between generations, you’ve also taken a couple of years out of the time a generation of products is available in volume. That in turn allows us to set a faster pace of innovation for our competitors to keep up with.

GROVE: Ideally you want to simply throw a switch and convert your entire production from the old and relatively less competitive range of products and technologies to a new generation. You can’t literally convert a whole new product generation in a single step-function fashion, but our fast, copy-exactly ramp-up approximates it.

MOORE: The point is to move the whole product line, not just a single part, to a more competitive performance position, which is several price points that you have to hit. People talk about how Intel cuts prices 20% or 30% or something–that’s standard business. But Intel puts a new, higher-performance chip into the mix where the top one was before and at a similar price. The idea with each new generation is to move a new performance group of product in to be competitive, rather than lower the price to be competitive.

Moore’s Law buys you more transistors to work with in each generation of your chip designs, which enables you to integrate more functions onto the basic processor. Have you always spent these transistors wisely?

MOORE: We’ve tried a variety of things along the way, and some of them were stillborn. The other things on the computer motherboard are changing a lot too. So if you stick everything on the main chip, you end up losing a lot of the flexibility that’s been so important in the evolution of the computer industry. A couple of years ago there was a product we called Timna, which was quite far along in development, that tightly integrated graphics right into the processor, and we decided pretty near to the end that, because of the flexibility it gave up, it wasn’t the best way to approach the market. So we killed it.

GROVE: It wasn’t that the market shifted, either. It was that the total wasn’t technologically competitive. But most of the time we manage to make these things work. A good example was putting the floating-point processor on the old 486 chip. That was a big success.

The implementation of on-chip cache memory was a success. Maybe my mind is playing games with me, but most of the things we’ve integrated into the chips have been successful, at least the things that I remember.

MOORE: I tend to remember the failures. (Laughter.) I expect everything to work.

This article first appeared in the November 11, 2002 issue of Fortune magazine.